Airpower Research Paper

The US has been involved in several wars since Vietnam. However, the characteristics of warfare have varied each time. Airpower continues to play a vital role in all of them, and technology and experience have allowed airpower to establish itself as a cornerstone capability of modern warfare. Operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom provide two excellent, but fundamentally different examples of how airpower provided a distinctive and overwhelming capability advantage to the US war fighting effort. Airpower has become more effective at achieving the strategic aims of defeating America’s enemies and minimizing civilian casualties by expanding the core mentality of strategic bombing alone, to a more flexible application where the type of war

Where Rolling Thunder emphasized a gradual escalation strategy, Instant Thunder’s was to be much more aggressive and deliberate. Instant Thunder followed the Five Rings strategy with a psychological operations focus for the population ring. This campaign, in addition to taking out Saddam Hussein’s regime was to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Airpower achieved its objectives in historic fashion. Civilian and friendly military casualties were minimal, Saddam’s regime was destroyed, and the entire war lasted only 42 days. The results of Desert Storm reflected the technological advances in precision-guided munitions strategic bombing doctrine had foreshadowed decades earlier and demonstrated a significant increase in the effectiveness of airpower since Vietnam. Although Desert Storm clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of airpower in executing its core doctrinal philosophies, historically, airpower was still one-dimensional in its application. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) provides a great example of the evolution of airpower from its core doctrinal philosophies to its alternative applications, further cementing its value as a cornerstone of the US military

It integrated inputs from Predator, RC-135, U-2, E-8, and other sensors around the clock. Leadership at higher levels often overshadowed the command and control capabilities of on-scene leadership. “Reduced to basics, the sensor-to-shooter cycle entailed finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, deciding, engaging, and assessing the results. Unlike Desert Storm, in OEF each of these functions required steadily less time, with the singular exception of deciding. That function grew substantially because of the nature of the war itself and of the target-approval process modern C4/ISR enabled. The bottom-line on ISR in OEF is that it was so robust; the level of comfort to make calls from eight time zones away was extremely high. This kind of first-world problem when properly managed was a welcomed burden from those benefiting from the capability on the